Ron's Log

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September 21, 2008

As part of my fun-seeking nature, I went to the McCain website to try to find a list of newspaper editorial endorsements. Nothing on the front page seemed to point to an area where I'd find endorsements, so I went to their search field which is buried way at the bottom. That's not usually considered the most user-friendly place to put a search field, but maybe the rules are different for political websites. After all, would a likely McCain voter use a search field?

Anyway, I typed "endorsements" into the field and it took me to a page where they wanted me to register to use the site! Yeah, really! Name, address, email just so I could read editorial endorsements. I began to suspect that Mr. McCain himself had done the design work.

I didn't register; I just used Google. It found this page of newspaper editorial endorsements of McCain on the official McCain website. The first obvious problem is that it still lists lots of primary endorsements. Time to update that page, boys. Second problem is that the links go to internal pages where (presumably) there would be copies of the editorials. That's a problem because it's tempting for a political campaign to edit those a bit to remove any negative remarks. But, third problem, none of the links work. All are dead.

If readers want to point me to their favorite editorial endorsements of McCain, here's the place to do it.

UPDATE: this is NOT a McCain endorsement:

| permalink | September 21, 2008 at 09:37 AM

Comments

Thanks for going to the effort to confirm that the design rules are different for campaign websites. Even Bob Barr's website works that way. The newspaper links I found on the Obama website all seem to point to primary endorsements, so they're irrelevant now...much like McCain's, I suppose.

But what we are looking for here is a well-written McCain endorsement to balance out the Seattle Times endorsement of Obama. Anyone got one?

Posted by: Ron's Log at Sep 22, 2008 10:56:31 AM

this is interesting. i went to the Obama website to look for newspaper endorsements. first i had to click a button saying i didn't want to give out my zip code and email address for some magnet giveaway i just wanted to go to the website. then i looked all over the website and couldn't find any newspaper endorsement links. so i tried looking for a place to search the wesite. nothing. no search ability.
so i used google. the second result was a list of "Newspapers that have endorsed Obama", in list form, with no links to any of the actual articles.
so i went back to google and found another page similar to the first one, except it does have links. odd, why the duplicate info? anyway, i found the "Palm Springs Desert Sun" on the list but it was a dead link. oh well. i guess they thought it would be too complicated to get permission to locally host their endorsements, as well as making a search feature on their website.

Posted by: Jeff at Sep 22, 2008 9:32:55 AM